A Lot of Top Journalists Don't Look at Traffic Numbers. Here's Why.

The Verge is one of the biggest and most influential technology news sites in the world, with 8.6 million monthly unique visitors and a staff of top-notch tech reporters. These are some internet-savvy editors and writers who probably know as much if not more about how to build an audience online than anyone in the business.

Yet the editors at The Verge have a policy that seems a little bit odd and anachronistic: They don’t let writers see how much traffic their stories generate. Ever.

What’s more, The Verge is not alone in this practice. Re/code, a tech site run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, the longtime Wall Street Journal tech columnist, also won’t share traffic stats with writers. MIT Technology Review holds numbers back too.

“We used to show the writers and editors traffic, and told them to grow it; but it had the wrong effect. So we stopped,“ says Jason Pontin, CEO, editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review. ”The unintended consequence of showing them traffic, and encouraging them to work to grow total audience, is that they became traffic whores. Whereas I really wanted them to focus on insight, storytelling, and scoops: quality.”

That phrase – “traffic whore” – tells you everything you need to know about why some journalists have an aversion to chasing traffic. They fear it creates an incentive to do the wrong things.

“As a general rule, we do not judge writers by numbers,” says Kara Swisher, the co-executive editor at Re/code, the new name for the former AllThingsD team. “In fact, we discourage it and urge them to cover what they think is right. We do not ignore traffic — we pay attention to what works in headlines — but we don’t put press on reporters to hit numbers.”

The sentiment holds across a lot of other places, at least according to an informal poll of journalist friends:

Quentin Hardy, deputy tech editor at the New York Times notes, via email, that reporters can find traffic data if they do some digging, but “the real question is how it drives thinking. Here it would not be considered something useful to over-obsess about. I have certainly never seen anyone write a story strictly because of the traffic it would get. To do so might arguably seem corrosive. We are much more focused on securing and growing a certain type of readership, usually educated and curious, which values accuracy, depth of knowledge, and reliability as much as speed.”

A reporter at a leading business newspaper says her editor stopped providing traffic stats, and she's glad. She can tell which stories resonate based on comments and social shares. But “very rarely” does anyone in editorial actually talk about traffic.

Those Who Look

Not everyone in the media business agrees. Sites like Gawker and Business Insider measure everything, and argue that that to do otherwise would be either naive or ridiculous or both.

Gawker founder Nick Denton displays traffic info on the wall of the Gawker newsroom showing Chartbeat info for the whole Gawker network as well as data on invidual writers. Denton say knows that most newspapers still keep writers in the dark about traffic, but “I don’t really care what they do. We find that numbers keeps a writer conscious of an audience; and managers alert to the motivation of the writer.”

Also, Denton points out, “Not every reader is created equal. Some are worth 100x or 1000x as much, if they also contribute, for instance, or promote us on social media or the traditional press. So we’re working to improve our measure of readership, to weight certain readers more heavily.”

Henry Blodget, CEO and editor of Business Insider, says: "We write for our readers, and our analytics allow us to do a much better job serving them. We cover what we think is important. And the moment we hit ‘publish,’ we get to see hether our readers agree that it’s important.

"If they don’t — if they’re not reading or sharing our stories — we ask ourselves whether they’re not reading or sharing them because we’ve done a bad job explaining why they’re important, or whether we were just wrong and they actually aren’t that important.

“On a personal note, not knowing or caring about readership just seems bizarre to me,” Blodget adds. “After a decade of working in this medium, I could not imagine writing without knowing how well I was connecting with my readers. That’s one of the joys of digital — the fact that you know that instantly. Back when I was writing for magazines, I had no idea how many people read my stories or whether they liked them or found them helpful or meaningful. I can’t imagine going back to that.”

The Rush

When I worked at Forbes and Newsweek we could see the numbers on our stories if we wanted to see them. Most of the time I didn’t ask, but if something was really taking off I’d check in to see what the total was. Even when I ran my own blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, I didn’t obsess about traffic. Sometimes I had advertisers, so I needed to tell them how many people they were reaching. But I never set out to "get traffic." I just wrote what I wanted to write. Whatever happened, happened.

That said, I’ll be honest – when something really does take off, it’s exhilarating. And it's addictive. You get that rush, and you want it again and again. I agree with Henry Blodget that one of the best things about writing for the web rather than writing for print is that you can actually see a story taking off. It’s a rush watching those numbers skyrocket. Any writer who says he or she doesn’t get off on that is just flat-out lying.

What About Marketers?

My colleagues on the HubSpot blogging team were appalled by the story about The Verge and almost couldn’t believe it was true. “This just seems CRAZY,” one wrote on email.

Of course at HubSpot we measure everything. There’s a relentless focus on numbers. This is our gospel, after all. This is what HubSpot’s product is all about; it lets you publish content and track how well that content is performing.

Our bloggers don’t just look at traffic data; they study that data, and analyze it, and slice and dice it, and pore thorugh it. We even have an editor whose main job is to stay on top of the analytics around our blog.

Moreover, and most important: Unlike journalists, our bloggers absolutely set out to get traffic and openly cop to doing so, without apology and without any sense of stigma. We consciously set out to create blog posts that we think will capture lots of views. We do A/B testing and change headlines to see which one will snare more views. We load our posts up with SEO, using the killer SEO capability in HubSpot's publishing system, aka our Content Optimization System or COS.

We have to watch the numbers. We’re under pressure to hit our traffic numbers every month. We have an SLA with our sales department, a number of leads we’ve committed to deliver every month. And we’re expected to keep those numbers going up.

When you're operating a lead gen blog, content is a means to an end, not an end in itself. A “win” for us is totally different than a “win” for the New York Times. In our world, the idea of never looking at traffic numbers seems quaint, or snooty, or maybe even hopelessly outdated, a sign that you’ve lost touch with with reality.

A Middle Ground

It seems to me that even in a marketing setting, even if the goal is lead generation, there may be something to be learned from those snooty editors who keep their writers in the dark. Maybe it's just because I've been a journalist all my life, and I can't get those old values out of my bloodstream. But I believe that there may be a middle ground, one where you watch the numbers and are aware of them without becoming a slave to them.

Oddly enough when I did the reporting for a recent ebook titled The CMO’s Guide to Brand Journalism, most of the brand journalists I spoke to said they keep an eye on traffic stats, but aren’t driven by them and don’t feel any pressure to boost uniques and page views from month to month.

These were people working at IBM, GE and Intel, among other places. Of course they’re not trying to sell ads, and they’re not trying to generate leads, so raw traffic doesn't matter much to them.

But also they are betting that they are better off trying to focus on doing quality work, bcause quality is what will enable content to stand out in a world that gets noisier every day.

There's another reason that some journalists don't get obsessed with traffic, and it has nothing to do with snobbery and everything to do with business. It's that they've learned that chasing traffic for the sake of traffic can be a fool's errand, one that has led some once-respected media companies to do things that have diluted and diminished their brands.

Finally, in case you're wondering: Yes, I wrote this story hoping that it would get a lot of traffic.

How does your organization look at traffic? What kind of pressure are you under? Let me know what you think in the comments below, and we can continue the conversation.

Even though we offer seo services to our clients and provide them with all kinds of stats we don't actually practice what we preach. We too have had a policy of not checking the stats of some of our own websites. Instead the time is taken up researching and creating content. On-site interaction be it comments, Likes Ratings tell us all we need to know. Just because people are landing an a site or page doesn't mean its any good. There are lies, damned lies and statistics. One particular client ordered us into his office as the increase in visitors had slowed and the click through ratio had fallen yet his online sales had increase.
We couldn't get through to him that it was due to us spending time optimizing the site for the visitor making it easier for them to find the products they wanted and checkout. Not blowing our own trumpet, just highlighting how some can be by hypnotized statistics.

Mark, that had never occurred to me -- but I'm sure customers fixate on the traffic numbers too. I think of it as akin to the "top line" number when really the "bottom line" is the number that matters. And as you point out there's not always a direct correlation between the two.
Do you guys run into this a lot with clients? I'm thinking there might be a story in this.

Good post, Dan.
A focus on anything too intensely is probably dangerous. As we've talked about before, I love that you do a lot of interviewing and exploration with other people as you write your posts. (It's probably not as efficient as writing from what you know, but it certainly brings perspective and opinion to the fore.) I also love that you share other's points of view and pose thoughtful questions that make your audience think.
The other day, we also talked about the "engagement opportunity" after the publish button is clicked and the relationships you can build as a blogger with individuals in your audience. With blogs, you can engage via comments and social media, building relationships and ultimately... impacting likelihood of conversion. How do you think engagement after publishing an article factors into the picture? If editors/writers are focused on page views, are they less likely to engage with their audience? If editors/writers are focused on reporting and exploration, are they more likely to engage?

Thanks for commenting, Pete. The glib answer to your first point is that if I only wrote what I know, I would not have much to write about! But honestly I do believe in reporting and talking to people for stories. It's mostly just habit; it's what I've done all my life. And one great thing about reporting is you set out to talk about one thing, and by the time you get off the phone you have five other story ideas that you weren't aware of. eg, you and I had a quick chat about sales coaching, just by accident, running into the hall one day; I call Rick Roberge; he tells me to call Kurlan; Kurlan puts Dennis Connelly on the line; and then with Connelly I get a treasure trove of other story ideas.
I also agree with you about engagement. Thing is, though, that engagement is hard to measure and page views are easy to measure, which is why SLAs get built around page views.
I'm not sure what effect this would have on conversion rates. But I do think any site benefits from engagement and more active commenting. I like to say that you go from *publication* to *conversation.*
I also have been thinking that going forward I'd like to include more customer comments in our stories. eg in this story it would have been nice to have a few customers tell us whether *they* fixate on traffic on their sites.
That way we could start building a community here, a place that our customers (and others) would feel part of and would come back to, and contribute to.

Let me know how I can help, Dan. I agree with you that there is a HUGE opportunity for HubSpot to create a very engaged community around our blog. Getting customers involved by interviewing them and getting quotes would be a great way to start that up. (Your thoughtful responses to comments will help too.) Let me know if you want some introductions.
PS. Threaded comments, man. They make "engagement" so much better. Someday you're going to have 100s of comments on your posts and we won't be able to keep track of them unless we stick with the threading. :-)
PPS. With HubSpot's software, we can see how well our content converts visitors into leads and leads into customers. So, we'll be able to correlate engagement to revenue. Ready to be add "rainmaker" to your resume?

Yes Dan, quite often. Its as frustrating as it is surprising. These are business people who are driven by money and sales so its hard to fathom. I think they spend too much time talking to web guys who are just that "web guys" or reading up on SEO forums and somewhere the waters becomes cloudy.

Hi Dan,
Great article! Hope it was highly visited. I straddle both worlds -- as a journalist and tech marketer, so I found this fascinating.
However, I think the functions of journalism and marketing are so fundamentally different. Marketing without monitoring seems foolhardy. You have a finite amount of content you can write about (especially for niche products) so you must choose wisely the writing style, headlines, images etc that convert.
As a journalist, if you concentrate too much on this, often your content suffers. I've written plenty of stories that weren't highly visited, but they were important stories to be told and I got feedback accordingly.
At the end of it, it's a delicate balance. Marketers shouldn't be obsessed by numbers, and journalists shouldn't ignore them either.

Thanks Ruchika, I agree, it's 2 very different things. But this new middle ground is emerging, the world of the "brand journalist." I wonder sometimes, which am I now? A journalist or a marketer? Or both?

The benefits/risks of providing real time metrics to reporters also depends on their understanding of digital news consumption and their beat. At a daily newspaper, we noticed city government stories about how taxpayer dollars were spent performed better than stories about what those same politicians were talking about. Those stories would never equal whatever mayhem was going on in the market. Once reporters understood how to use the metrics reporting for apples-to-apples comparisons, it eased the concerns about becoming page view whores.

Nels, I totally agree. I think the right balance might be to see the numbers but to understand them and not be driven by them. For reporters that may mean reassuring them that they're not being measured by page views, or at least not totally by page views. I think what Kara and Jason found, however, is that even if you tell reporters that, if they see the numbers some reporters are going to start aiming for traffic. It's human nature. "What can I do to get traffic?" But at the same time I think flying blind is kind of nuts too.
I treat different projects with a different approach. Some work is all about getting page views and that's one kind of work. But I've also done work where it doesn't matter at all. Here's an extreme example. I've done some writing for Newsweek Japan. I write in English and send them my copy. They translate it and publish it in Japanese, and in a print-only edition. As a courtesy they send me the PDF of the finished story. I have no idea what it says. And I have no idea if anyone reads it, or what they think about it. Why do projects like this? The money wasn't great. But I did it because the assignments were interesting, and I enjoyed the process of reporting and writing. And that was it. Doing the story was pleasurable for me. Most times I learned something new. The journey was the reward.
I like to believe that if writers and journalists "follow their bliss," and just pursue stories that they personally find interesting, then they will find an audience. Maybe I'm naive.
I also don't believe in growth for the sake of growth. My Fake Steve blog had about 1 million monthly uniques, give or take. Some months would be 1.5 million, some months would be 800,000. But at some point I realized that this was basically the size that this blog would get to. It would never be 10x that size, unless I made changes that were so huge that they radically changed the nature of the blog. So that was it. The blog, as it was conceived, was going to reach about 1 million people. And I realized, that's fine. I didn't need a bigger audience. I had a great audience, who were very engaged. Sometimes you just need to be satisfied with what you have.

Dan,
Great article. Seems pretty clear to me that in a world where the ability to create content is infinite, and authors and authority are the key driver of value, that the world MUST move to a model where content is compensated based on consumption and not creation. This is, after all, the way we compensate value creators in books (royalties), music (royalties) and film (percent of gross receipts). To not compensate journalists based on audience or traffic, and to not even allow them to see the value they create, says to me: This is a publisher who is trying to retain and lock up their most valuable talent by keeping them in the dark about their inherent value.
In a world in which Nate Silver, Walt Mossberg, and Matt Taibbi can just walk away with their audience and hang up a shingle, it is possibly a protectionist move to hide performance from authors. And they will likely, as well, try to prevent journalists from writing for brands, and moving their audiences. But it isn't the future.
PS. My company, MovableMedia is a performance based royalty platform for influencers/writers...and we see about 5x the traffic when authors are given incentives and feedback to move audiences to the content they create for brands.

Hey Andrew, MovableMedia sounds like a cool idea. And yes, the age of stats has ushered in the age of the free-agent journalist. I suppose there were always big names who were offered better jobs in journalism based on the stories they were producing, or scoops they could deliver. But now a writer can go to a new employer armed with numbers -- Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. It's a new world, for sure.

Analytics is killing the news industry. It started in the late 90's with Fox News and the other outlets chasing their model. What we say we want as news consumers and what we actually want are different. We want controversy and rational opinions or hard news doesn't move the needle like 'click bating' does, its just a fact. Good for The Verge I hope it translates into greater returns in the long run because that's ultimately what matters.
Ryan, www.radiumcrm.com